[K12OSN] Fedora Education Initiative Launch
Greg DeKoenigsberg
gdk at redhat.com
Tue Apr 11 06:24:01 UTC 2006
On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Tom Hoffman wrote:
> First off, I welcome any contributions Fedora and/or Red Hat can make
> toward promoting Linux and open source in education. I'm a little
> confused about whether Fedora == Red Hat in this case, specifically
> I'm not sure how much money Fedora has at its disposal compared to Red
> Hat, so the following suggestions may be pointless (that is, if there
> isn't actually much money in play). But I'll make them anyhow. If
> Fedora doesn't have the money maybe someone else does.
There's some money. Fedora gets its funding primarily from Red Hat. It's
not exactly a river of money -- but for this kind of thing, I think we can
make a case for enough money to hold a good conference.
> There are two things I'd like to see:
>
> Saying "the solution to this problem is to hold a conference" seems
> almost as lame as saying "what we need to do now is form a committee."
> But the open source in education community in the US, badly, badly
> needs a national conference. Nobody really knows what's going on on
> the national scale. What in God's name is going on in Indiana? Has
> anyone actually talked to Mike Huffman? There's a tremendous mix of
> grass-roots, corporate and larger state and district backed projects
> going on, but very little coordination or information moving around.
> Or if it is taking place, it is somewhere I don't know about. Most of
> the key players haven't met. Many of them are using free software
> because they don't have much money, which means they also don't have
> much money or time to travel to conferences, either. Not to mention
> networking with people from Spain, Brazil, etc., where they're plowing
> ahead of us in using free software in schools. So we're long overdue
> for a "Free Software in Schools Summit." We need to have one next
> year.
Is there general consensus about this? And what would be the goal --
information sharing, primarily?
> Increased presence of free software at all the mainstream ed-tech
> conferences around the country. I'm not actually attending the
> innumerable little conferences going on around the country, but my
> impression is that, with a few notable exceptions (lately thanks to
> Steve H.) the open source profile is quite low. This could easily be
> a full time job for someone all by itself. While having strong
> regional networks of open source supporters is vital, I think a few
> nationally barnstorming evangelists would make a big difference, too.
How about lots of well-connected part-time evangelists who have a strong
communications network, a strong unified message, and marketing materials?
--g
-------------------------------------------------------------
Greg DeKoenigsberg || Fedora Project || fedoraproject.org
Be an Ambassador || http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors
-------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the K12OSN
mailing list